Category: Media

Anti-gunners need to face reality on gun manufacturer

The firearm community consists of two primary groups: The gun owners and the gun manufacturers and sellers. The firearm industry provides the goods and services we all need in order to enjoy our Second Amendment rights.
Going after gun owners is, typically, a losing strategy for anti-gunners. It doesn’t take much to show that gun owners are law-abiding folks and that if we were all dangerous, with over 400 million guns in private hands, violent crime would be much worse.
So, they’ve long gone after gun stores, but they haven’t exactly left gun manufacturers alone.
In fact, a recent op-ed tries to blame them for a whole lot.
We often talk about where and how weapons are purchased — but rarely where and how they are manufactured. These realities challenge the conventional way we talk about guns in terms of a “culture war” between red and blue states.
For example, the blue states of Massachusetts and Connecticut have some of the strictest regulations on firearms carrying and possession. But they are also major sites of gun manufacturing in this country. The weapons used in the 2018 Parkland shooting, for example, were manufactured by Smith and Wesson, a gun manufacturer based in Massachusetts.
The deeper and bigger point is that the U.S. is the world’s principal supplier of weapons.
The U.S. weapons industry makes both heavy weapons like military aircraft, bombs, and missiles, and small arms like rifles and handguns. As of 2021, over 40 percent of the world’s exported arms came from the United States — many of them manufactured in deep blue states.
Blue states with strict gun laws often suffer gun violence when weapons are trafficked in from red states with looser gun laws. Similarly, many countries surrounding the U.S. with high rates of gun violence, like Mexico, obtain guns both legally and illegally from this country.
With no system to effectively control and track who ends up with those guns, these weapons are often obtained by military units or police that have committed human rights abuses or who work with criminal groups.
In other words, literally every sin ever committed with a gun rests on the gun manufacturers’ heads.
However, I’m going to clue the writers–there are two of them, so they’re clearly twice as ignorant–on a few facts about how gun distribution works in this country.
First, let’s talk about domestic gun sales.
The gun manufacturer builds a given firearm and then sells it. It’s true that, in theory, anyone can buy that gun and have it shipped to pretty much any city in the nation…to a point.
The weapon needs to first be legal in that state, for one thing. An AR-15 that’s legal in Georgia isn’t legal in Massachusetts, so local laws need to be obeyed.
Second, that gun must go to someone with the proper licensing. Since most people don’t have an FFL, they are generally shipped to a gun store, which then conducts all the required background checks and whatnot. As such, the gun manufacturer can ship it out trusting that everything required will be done.
Yet after it leaves the store, they have absolutely no control over what happens. That customer could have the gun stolen or he could just hand it off to someone else. They have no say.
Then the writers talk about atrocities abroad as if companies like Colt are to blame.
Except, those companies can’t just export guns because someone cut them a check. Due to federal law, weapons exports must be approved by the State Department. Again, Colt can’t ship a bunch of M-4s somewhere just because they want to. They need government approval to do so lawfully.
Once they’re sent, the gun manufacturers are, once again, powerless to do anything about what happens with those weapons.
See, our intrepid authors are convinced that these gun makers are the scum of the Earth, but they can’t seem to grok that they’re ruled by numerous regulations other industries simply don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t be the merchants of death they’re painted as even if they wanted.
Frankly, these two should be embarrassed by what they wrote and the publication that printed it should be embarrassed as well. What we have here is a screed dictated by ignorance with a few links thrown it to make it look like they did their research.
They should actually try doing some next time.

Seems? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’.

Op-ed writer seems to misunderstand data on guns

One reason I cannot be accused of living in a pro-gun echo chamber is that I have to ready a lot of anti-gun op-eds in the course of my work here. I know all the arguments they’re going to make and where they’re coming from because I read their words on a daily basis.

But when it comes to guns, many just don’t understand the topic as well as they’d like to think.

They regurgitate talking points and used biased data from gun control groups and pretend that they’re well-versed on the topic.

However, a writer with the Philadelphia Tribune took the discussion of gun control in a bizarre direction.

While new gun control laws such as strengthening background checks for gun buyers and raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 are needed, it would be misleading to suggest new gun laws alone will reduce gun violence.

That’s because most gun crimes are committed by those who illegally possess guns, according to a study of inmates in federal and state prisons, conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Since most violent crimes are not committed by legal gun owners and there is little chance of significant new gun laws passing anytime soon in the state Legislature or Congress, local officials must focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession.

More effective policing, vigorous prosecution and stricter sentencing of violent criminals using illegally obtained weapons will be needed to reduce crime.

The last three paragraphs look pretty sensible. The author is right, for example, that most criminals possess their firearms illegally. He’s right that there’s little chance new gun laws will pass anytime soon. While I’m not sure that increased enforcement of current gun laws will produce the results he desires, I can at least accept that’s a potentially viable path.

By his own words, though, lawful gun owners aren’t the problem, so why should we pass more gun control laws in the first place?

Even if we dismiss the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right we’re talking about here, just what reason would we have to restrict who can buy guns by age even further than we already do or increase background checks?

Perhaps the author is concerned about the 647 “mass shootings” reported by Gun Violence Archive. If so, he should be aware that most of those were criminals shooting people in the first place, not 19-year-olds buying AR-15s and shooting up schools. Gun Violence Archive doesn’t differentiate between gang warfare and active shooters killing everyone in a crowded movie theater, for example, so the vast majority of those shootings aren’t what people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting.”

Either way, the author is somehow failing to comprehend the information clearly in front of him.

Honestly, I’m amazed he finished the piece, what with the cognitive dissonance that had to be tearing at him. Or, maybe he just didn’t understand it enough to feel such a thing.

Either way, he discredits his own claim that more gun control laws should be passed and it sure looks like he knows it.

What AP calls ‘turmoil,’ we call ‘about time’

The Associated Press, or AP, is supposed to be unbiased, though we’ve all seen countless examples of them being anything but.

That’s especially true regarding matters pertaining to the Second Amendment.

These days, the right to keep and bear arms may have a firmer foundation on which to rest following the Bruen decision. It’s rather clear that there can be no total gun ban and that any restriction has to conform to a particular framework that won’t be easy for any law.

It seems this has led to what the AP calls “turmoil” in the courts.

A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment is upending gun laws across the country, dividing judges and sowing confusion over what firearm restrictions can remain on the books.

The high court’s ruling that set new standards for evaluating gun laws left open many questions, experts say, resulting in an increasing number of conflicting decisions as lower court judges struggle to figure out how to apply it.

The Supreme Court’s so-called Bruen decision changed the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating challenges to firearm restrictions. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the justices said.

Under the Supreme Court’s new test, the government that wants to uphold a gun restriction must look back into history to show it is consistent with the country’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Courts in recent months have declared unconstitutional federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers,felony defendants and people who use marijuana. Judges have shot down a federal ban on possessing guns with serial numbers removed and gun restrictions for young adults in Texas and have blocked the enforcement of Delaware’s ban on the possession of homemade “ghost guns.”

In several instances, judges looking at the same laws have come down on opposite sides on whether they are constitutional in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court majority’s ruling. The legal turmoil caused by the first major gun ruling in a decade will likely force the Supreme Court to step in again soon to provide more guidance for judges.

“There’s confusion and disarray in the lower courts because not only are they not reaching the same conclusions, they’re just applying different methods or applying Bruen’s method differently,” said Jacob Charles, a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school who focuses on firearms law.

Sure, there’s a bit of confusion. The Bruen decision has set a stage most courts have never seen before. They now have to consider whether the Founders would have approved of such a law by looking at whether or not they approved of something similar during their own time.

But is it really a bad thing?

The only downside is that it’s taken us this long to get to this point. While the AP is apparently concerned that the status quo has been upturned, I’m more upset that the status quo was allowed to become the status quo in the first place.

It’s just insane that it came to this.

Yet here we are. We now have an opportunity to right the ship and put the onus on things back where they were. No longer can courts just claim it’s in the government’s interest to restrict our rights – something they’d never say about the First or Fourth Amendments, it should be remembered – but must instead look at the matter objectively and compare it to historical precedent.

The AP may lament this “turmoil,” but I only lament that we didn’t have this upheaval a long time ago.

NPR talks about “major takeaways” from ATF report

The ATF has always at least felt politicized to gun owners. After all, it’s a federal agency that perpetually seems dedicated to restricting our rights. At no point is there any illustration that the agency actually wants to help gun owners or benefit them in any way.

Lately, though, things were turned up to 11.

But data is, at least in theory, just data. While it can be manipulated in various ways, there’s often some degree of usefulness to it.

Leave it to NPR to not just look at it, but try to present it in the most heavily biased way possible.

Stolen guns, untraceable weapons and other deadly devices are becoming more prevalent in U.S. gun crimes, new federal data shows.

Last week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released an expansive federal report on guns used in crimes in two decades, providing the public with more detail about stolen firearms and gun trafficking.

The data stretches from 2017 and 2021. During that period, local police reported a shrinking turnaround time for a legally purchased gun to be used in a crime. It also provides insight into the spike in ghost guns and conversion devices.

ATF Director Steven M. Dettelbach wrote that the findings offer “strategic intelligence” for policy makers, law enforcement and researchers to reduce gun violence.

Gun policy experts have said that the release of this data is a big step in better understanding gun crime in the U.S., and can better educate policymakers on the need to regulate several areas of the gun industry.

Because it’s always about regulation, isn’t it.

It should be noted that while this is posted on NPR’s website there’s no actual link to the ATF’s report. Nor does there appear to be a press release on the ATF’s website.

Interesting.

So what about these takeaways in question? Well, it’s interesting in how little framing we’ve got.

Legally purchased firearms are being used in crimes sooner than ever

The ATF found that 54% of traced crime guns were recovered by law enforcement more than three years after their purchase. Those guns were legally purchased, but were later used in crimes, the report indicated.

“Crime guns may change hands a number of times after that first retail sale, and some of those transactions may be a theft or violate one or more regulations on firearm commerce,” the ATF’s report reflected.

“We’ve had record gun sales in the United States, particularly in and around the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021. And the vast majority of those guns are, of course, purchased by law abiding citizens and with no intent to commit crime,” James Densley, a sociologist with the Violence Project, said. In addition to tracking mass shootings with the Violence Project, Densley also studies everyday gun violence and homicide.

“But what we know is from the large numbers of gun sales, there are lots of ways that legal guns end up in the hands of prohibited persons.”

OK, but what’s not mentioned is how much the time has reduced. Are we talking years earlier or mere days? That’s some important information. After all, if the time dropped from 20 years to three, then something sure does seem wonky. If it goes from 3.2 years to 3.1 years, not so much.

That’s far from the only takeaway, though. For example, they note more than a million guns are stolen, which is unfortunate to say the least. Stolen guns are a huge problem and something lawful gun owners want to help mitigate as best they can.

After all, if my guns get stolen, not only am I deprived of my property but someone else might be hurt with one.

NPR also brings up the ATF’s great boogieman, “ghost guns.”

Privately made firearms, also called “ghost guns,” and their involvement in crime “is an emerging issue,” the ATF said in its analysis. Still, law enforcement agencies are just beginning to establish uniform training on how to recognize, identify, and report ghost guns.

The number of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement agencies and sent to the ATF for tracing and tracking “increased by 1,083% from 2017 (1,629) to 2021 (19,273).” This indicates, for one thing, that these ghost guns are increasingly being used to commit crimes, the ATF concludes.

Now, let’s be clear, that is a significant increase over such a short stretch of time.

However, the better question is what percentage of total guns sent for tracing did unserialized firearms account for from year to year.

Let’s remember that 2020 and 2021 were particularly violent years. It’s entirely likely that at least some of that increase was really just because of the increase in violent crime as a whole.

I suspect that if we looked at those numbers, the difference wouldn’t seem so stark.

Yet despite that, it does look like a lot more so-called ghost guns are being sent to the ATF for tracing. I can’t help but note, however, that until the media started freaking out over homemade firearms, remarkably few people were using them for criminal activity.

That didn’t make it in this report, I’m sure.

Look, I could go through the whole thing, but all we have is biased reporting of what the ATF’s report said and we know how that goes. Absolutely none of it changes the fact that our rights are what they are and that gun control laws uniformly fail to prevent criminals from arming themselves.

As such, the report was mostly a waste of taxpayer dollars.

In that way, it’s much like the ATF itself.

Rep. Lauren Boebert Introduces Act to Require DOJ to Report All Social Media Company Payments

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) introduced the Exposing Lewd Outlays for Social Networking Companies (ELON) Act, which would require the Department of Justice (DOJ) to report the money sent to social media companies.

ELON Act would require the DOJ to submit to Congress all payments made to social media companies since January 1, 2015. She added that the bill would also require “a report from all agencies on federal dollars sent to big tech companies” and place a one-year hold on additional spending.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Boebert’s bill follows recent revelations that the FBI was paying Twitter the administration costs of processing its requests and for other matters.

“Big Tech is in bed with the FBI and other agencies to the point where Congress can’t tell where one ends and the other begins,” Boebert said, speaking to Fox News. “The millions of dollars sent to  that we know of during an election year when they were at the same time censoring the Hunter Biden laptop from hell, is incredibly concerning.”

“We must expose the incestuous relationship between Big Tech and the federal government,” Boebert said. “My bill does exactly that.”

The bill already has several Republican co-sponsors, including ’s Anna Paulina Luna and Matt Gaetz, Arizona’s Paul Gosar, Troy Nehls from , Eric Burlison from Missouri, and Indiana’s Mary Miller.

AP less than thrilled over Missouri gun bill’s defeat

When somewhere like the AP or any news organization starts talking about gun control stories, there’s always some level of poor understanding involved. That’s almost to be expected. After all, even under the most charitable interpretation of what’s going on, the reporters covering these stories and commentators discussing them aren’t exactly experts on firearms.

So, it’s not shocking they’d get some things wrong here and there.

Yet a recent story by the AP about a gun control measure being voted down in Missouri raises more questions than it can possibly answer.

The Republican-led House in Missouri on Wednesday voted against a proposal to ban minors from openly carrying firearms without adult supervision in public.

The proposal failed by a 104-39 vote, with only one Republican state representative voting in support of it.

Democratic state Rep. Donna Baringer told the Associated Press that police in her district were concerned about “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s,” and are demanding change.

“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said regarding concealed carry by children in Missouri. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”

Now, to start off with, it seems pretty straightforward. A bill banning minors from carrying openly without adult supervision is something that even many gun rights advocates might consider supporting. Many won’t, though, and mostly because such a law is way too broad. Many of us went hunting on our own as kids and such a measure may restrict one’s ability to do that.

But then things get wonky with where the AP goes next.

Missouri lawmakers in 2017 repealed concealed carry requirements in most situations.

What does that have to do with anything?

Open carry and concealed carry are very different things, though neither should be restricted. What does a 2017 concealed carry measure have to do with a refusal to pass a blanket prohibition on teens carrying firearms without an adult right there with them?

Nothing.

Then again, this is the AP. There’s absolutely no reason they wouldn’t mention such a thing, likely in hopes of people conflating the two.

However, there are reasons why this bill didn’t go anywhere, and it had nothing to do with some strong desire to see 14-year-olds marching down the streets of St. Louis with AR-15s.

Not that I’d legitimately expect there to be any significant reporting on just why that is.

After all, in that entire piece, there’s exactly one quote from anyone who opposed the bill, despite the story being about the measure’s defeat. Instead, it’s all about how hard it is to pass gun control in Missouri.

And the AP thinks we still believe they’re unbiased? That’s downright hilarious.

Look, if parents are doing their job, the chances of Junior carrying a gun openly in public without their permission is effectively nil. It’s just not going to happen. If they’re not going their job, there’s no law in the world that will stop it from happening. That’s just the hard facts of life.

Too bad the AP didn’t mention that, either.

Congress is set to expose what may be the largest censorship system in U.S. history.

This coming week a new House select subcommittee will hold its first hearing on the FBI and the possible “weaponization” of government agencies. A variety of such controversies have contributed to plunging public trust in government and the FBI in particular.

The role of the FBI in prior scandals will remain a point of heated debate in Congress. However, members of both parties should be able to agree on the need to investigate one of the most serious allegations: Censorship by surrogate.

Many of the allegations of FBI bias are worthy of investigation. Some of those allegations are problems of personnel who can be removed. But a far more menacing problem has emerged in recent months with the release of information from Twitter.

The “Twitter files” revealed an FBI operation to monitor and censor social media content — an effort so overwhelming and intrusive that Twitter staff at one point complained internally that “they are probing & pushing everywhere.” The reports have indicated that dozens of FBI employees worked on the identification and removal of material on a wide range of subjects and that Twitter largely carried out their requests.

Nor was it just the FBI, apparently. Emails reveal FBI figures like a San Francisco assistant special agent in charge asking Twitter executives to “invite an OGA” (or “Other Government Organization”) to an upcoming meeting. A week later, Stacia Cardille, a senior Twitter legal executive, indicated the OGA was the CIA, an agency under strict limits regarding domestic activities.

Twitter’s own ranks included dozens of ex-FBI agents and executives, including James Baker, who featured greatly in prior FBI instances of alleged bias.

The Twitter files also show various FBI offices monitoring social media and flagging “misleading” information on various subjects.

The dozens of disclosed emails are only a fraction of Twitter’s files and do not include still-undisclosed but apparent government coordination with Facebook and other social media companies. Much of that work apparently was done through the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which operated secretly it seems to censor citizens.

Ironically, during the outcry over establishing a Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, Biden administration officials had to have known they already were employing an extensive censorship system. When the administration finally relented and disbanded the disinformation board, that censorship work appears to have continued unimpeded through the FITF and agency censors.

According to reports, one email in August 2022 sent “long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos” deemed to be voicing “anti-Ukraine narratives.” Even satirical and comedy sites reportedly were pegged by the social media police.

What is most striking is that the FBI was not responding to false claims about its operations. Instead, these censorship demands were the result of policing “misinformation” and “disinformation” on subjects ranging from political corruption to elections.

Some apologists continue to defend this process, saying the FBI was only objecting to disinformation the way that citizens did on Twitter. That is not true; the government reportedly used back channels and regular meetings to flag unacceptable statements. Indeed, even if it were true, many things are more dangerous when done by government. When your neighbor attacks your opinion, it is just the crank next door. But when it is your government on the attack, it is far more threatening and stigmatizing.

Even if this operation did not cross the constitutional line, there are ample reasons why a democracy does not want the government in the business of targeting those whom it views as misleading or misinforming the public. While the FBI has every reason to pursue criminal fraud, this operation appears to have targeted speech it deemed harmful to political or social discourse.

For years, many politicians and pundits have dismissed free-speech concerns by noting that the First Amendment only applies to the government. So long as corporations do the censoring, they contend, it is not a free-speech problem.

This obviously is wrong on several fronts.

The First Amendment is not the exclusive measure of free speech. Corporate censorship of political commentaries or news stories are denials of free speech that harm our democratic system.

Second, this is a First Amendment violation. The Twitter files have substantiated long-standing concerns over “censorship by surrogate” or proxy. As with other amendments like the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches or seizures, the government cannot use private agents to do indirectly what it cannot do directly. Just as a police officer cannot direct a security guard to break into an apartment and conduct a search, the FBI cannot use Twitter to censor Americans.

To be fair, there were occasions when Twitter reportedly balked at government demands for raw political censorship — in one case, a demand by Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) led a frustrated Twitter censor to object that “We don’t do this.”

Nevertheless, Twitter’s management certainly now seems to admit that the company worked as an agent of the FBI and carried out most demands for social media suspensions, removals or blocks of individuals. At the same time, the FBI pushed for closer collaboration on content removal.

We do not know the full extent of this operation or its impact, but Congress should want to know if the FBI and other agencies created a system of censorship-by-surrogate. The only reason we now have Twitter’s previously secret communications is because an eccentric billionaire bought the company.

The broader effort with other companies could well constitute the largest censorship program ever run by the government — a system designed to escape both public and judicial scrutiny. It also shows how it is no longer necessary to have a “Ministry of Information” to maintain a state media: You can have an effective state media by consent rather than by coercion or control.

The FBI’s response to disclosure of these long-secret communications is particularly chilling. When some critics denounced it as raw censorship, the FBI accused them of being “conspiracy theorists … feeding the American public misinformation.” So, criticism of the FBI’s work to censor citizens resulted in an official statement denouncing those citizens.

None of these denials or attacks succeed, however. The public understands the threat and strongly supports an investigation into the FBI’s role in censoring social media. Despite the push for censorship by some politicians and pundits, most Americans still want free-speech protections. It is in our DNA.

This country was founded on deep commitments to free speech and limited government — and that constitutional tradition is no conspiracy theory.

Exclusive: Fox News Executives Censor Tucker Carlson in Order to Protect Pfizer

The first line of Tucker Carlson’s monologue last night was, “How powerful exactly are the big pharmaceutical companies in this country?”

It turns out the answer is: powerful enough to censor Tucker Carlson, the #1 most watched show on cable news.

Thank you for reading Karlstack. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The censored story in question is this bombshell from Project Veritas that broke Wednesday evening, in which their hidden camera team captures a Pfizer executive named Jordan Walker — the Director of Research & Development Strategic Operations, just 3 rungs down from the CEO on their org chart — bragging about how Pfizer is conducting gain of function research on the Covid virus (he coyly refers to it not as “gain of function”, but “directed evolution”, wink wink).

Twitter avatar for @Project_Veritas

Project Veritas @Project_Veritas
BREAKING: @pfizer Exploring “Mutating” COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines “Don’t tell anyone this…There is a risk…have to be very controlled to make sure this virus you mutate doesn’t create something…the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest.” #DirectedEvolution

12:30 AM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

77,308Retweets
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This story was promptly censored by Google.

Twitter avatar for @DrEliDavid

Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid
.@Project_Veritas exposed what’s probably the most important story on Pfizer and Covid. But if you Google it, you get this:
Image

7:45 AM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

1,910Retweets

None of the cable news anchors at any network reported on it, not even at Fox.

Except for one, Tucker Carlson.

Here is the 16-minute long monologue, broken up into 2 parts:

When the episode was uploaded to Fox Nation this morning, however, the monologue was less than 4 minutes long. Fox Nation is Fox’s subscription video service that uploads every episode after it airs.

Fox Nation is paywalled, so you can’t check yourself, but here is a screenshot showing the first guest appearing at the 4:02 mark. In contrast, in the full monologue, this guest appears at the 16:00 minute mark.

Where did those missing 12 minutes go?

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The nomenklatura is real. It sprang to life with the first law Congress passed that restricted the people and exempted goobermint.

American Nomenklatura.

A few weeks after Elon Musk formally acquired Twitter in October 2022, a senior official at the company who quit in the wake of Musk’s arrival took to the New York Times to pour cold water on Musk’s vision for the social-media platform. Yoel Roth, whose title had been Head of Trust and Safety, sought to assure his fellow progressives. Roth wrote that even if Musk wanted to remove the web of content-moderation rules and procedures Roth had helped create and enforce, the tech billionaire would be unable to achieve his aim. “The moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online,” he wrote.

What Roth meant was this: No Internet platform is an island, and Musk simply didn’t have the power to do what he wanted despite his 100 percent ownership of the social-media platform. It wasn’t merely that Musk would have to contend with Twitter’s progressive workforce, which believes that some political speech is so awful that it should be throttled or banned. He would also come into conflict with European regulators, the Federal Trade Commission, and Congress, all of whom also seek to limit what can be said online. And what about the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a trade organization of some of the world’s biggest consumer brands that advocates for “online safety”—a euphemism for protecting social-media users from accounts that may offend, harass, or trigger them?

He would also be dogged by advocacy groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which have found a new and lucrative mission monitoring social-media platforms for hate speech. They work hand in hand with elite journalists and think tankers, who have taken to tracking the spread of misinformation and disinformation online. In Washington, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have personnel whose job it is to alert social-media companies to foreign propaganda and terrorism. In Atlanta, the Centers for Disease Control seeks to quarantine dangerous information that might lead Americans to forgo masks or vaccine boosters. And perhaps most important, there are other Silicon Valley giants—Apple and Google—that provide the digital storefronts or app stores that Twitter needs to update their software and continue to run its service.

Call it the “content-moderation industrial complex.” In just a few short years, this nomenklatura has come to constitute an implicit ruling class on the Internet, one that collectively determines what information and news sources the rest of us should see on major platforms. Talk about “free speech” and “the First Amendment” may actually be beside the point here. The Twitter that Musk bought was part of a larger machine—one that attempts to shape conversations online by amplifying, muzzling, and occasionally banning participants who run afoul of its dogma.

The existence of this nomenklatura has been known for a few years. But thanks to Musk and his decision to make Twitter’s internal communications and policies available to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others, more detail is now known on why and how this elite endeavors to protect us from all manner of wrongthink.

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Reporter Hits Gavin Newsom With Reality Check After Dangerous 2A Comments

We’ve seen it all too often where after a mass shooting the media and Democrats immediately begin calling for more restrictions on gun rights, and demonizing the Second Amendment and those who support it.

Like clockwork, that exact scenario played out over the weekend and into Monday in the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting that happened during a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, California Saturday night which saw the Asian-American gunman kill eleven and injure nine.

But in a pretty surprising and rare display of actual journalism, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell pushed back on an anti-2A claim made by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who she interviewed on Monday to get his thoughts on the Monterey Park tragedy:

“Nothing about this is surprising. Everything about this is infuriating,” he told “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell on Monday. “The Second Amendment is becoming a suicide pact.”

Newsom clarified that he has “no ideological opposition” against people who “responsibly” own guns and get background checks and training on how to use them.

The reason Newsom “clarified” his comments to O’Donnell was because right after he called the Second Amendment a “suicide pact,” something he’s said before, she informed him that there are “many people in this country that support the Second Amendment and are lawful gun owners.”

I was so shocked to see this come from the mouth of someone in the mainstream media that I had to do a double take at first to make sure the clip was real and not something that was being misinterpreted. But sure enough, that’s exactly what she said.

O’Donnell was, of course, exactly right. If we didn’t have such an activist media when it comes to issues like gun rights we’d see a lot more step in like she did and point out for the record that the vast majority of Second Amendment proponents are law-abiding citizens who support having the Constitutional right so they can protect themselves and their families – and others, potentially, depending on the situation – from someone who could try to harm them.

O’Donnell also hit back at Newsom over the report that the gunman “used a modified pistol with a high-capacity magazine illegal in California.” Newsom didn’t have any good answer for it:

When asked how the gunman was able to get the weapon, Newsom responded “we will figure it out,” adding, “That’s going to happen. You got to enforce laws. Things fall through the cracks, but it doesn’t mean you give up.”

Newsom mentioned the role of mental health in mass shootings, but he singled out gun access as a factor exacerbating the problem.

Not surprisingly, what he left out was that a bad guy who wants a gun doesn’t care about gun laws obviously and will go about getting their guns and ammo regardless of how strict a state’s gun laws are. This is exactly why defenders of the Second Amendment say the government shouldn’t make it harder for law-abiding citizens to obtain one, because in the end it’s the people who follow the law who ultimately end up paying the price.

Gun Wars: An Interview with Larry Correia

Larry Correia is a bestselling author of thriller SF/fantasy fiction.  He’s also a gun enthusiast.  Now he’s written a nonfiction work on gun rights and the Second Amendment.  I read an advance copy and found myself flying through the pages – it’s super-interesting and engaging, even to someone like me who’s been a shooter and gun-rights supporter and part of this world for many years.   The book is In Defense of the Second Amendment, and it comes out on Tuesday.

I thought it would be nice to ask him some questions, which are featured below. As usual, the article is free to everyone, but comments are limited to paid subscribers.

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Der apfel fält nicht weit vom baum (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree)

Klaus Schwab’s Father Ran ‘National Socialist Model Company,’ Exploited Nazi Slave Labor.

Davos frontman Klaus Schwab’s daddy, Eugen Schwab, while the Third Reich was ravaging Europe in the 1930s and 40s, served as managing director of Escher Wyss Ravensburg, an engineering firm that constructed turbines and fighter plane parts for the regime.

While the elder Schwab worked in this capacity, the Nazis awarded Escher Wyss Ravensburg the prestigious title of “National Socialist Model Company” for all of its hard work in the service of the Führer.

To achieve this recognition, Escher-Wyss Ravensburg, under Eugen Schwab’s leadership, utilized Nazi slave labor and prisoners of war in its facilities.

Ravensburg itself, aside from the slave factory, was the site of numerous Nazi crimes against humanity, such as forced sterilization for the purpose of “racial improvement.” But to Eugen Schwab, that was just the cost of doing business with the Third Reich.

You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs, right?

Klaus Schwab’s sanitized Wikipedia page contains none of the gruesome details of his daddy’s wartime activities, other than to say “his parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss.”

Newsweek ran a corporate “fact check” in which they cherry-picked a falsely attributed image of Eugen in a Nazi uniform as a way to seem to disprove his connection to the Third Reich entirely. But deep into the article, Newsweek subtly admits that it’s all true — which almost no one will get to, thanks to short attention spans:

The posts shared online in May, 2022, claim Klaus Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, was a close ally of Hitler, and include a photo of the World Economic Forum leader alongside a man in Nazi uniform… the photo shared online is not of Eugen Schwab, but of Nazi general Walter Dybilasz… Klaus Schwab’s father, on the other hand, was the managing director of a subsidiary of Zurich-based engineering firm Escher Wyss. 

The history of Eugen’s relationship with Nazism in general is complex… Eugen Schwab was a member of some National Socialist organizations, but that alone does not prove any relationship to German high command or a belief in Nazi ideology. While the Escher Wyss branch in Ravensburg, Germany, (which Eugen managed) used prisoners of war and forced laborers, it is not clear whether the company was forced to do so by the Nazis or because of a lack of workers.

So, Eugen Schwab was an avowed National Socialist, and yes, okay, his firm did use Nazi slave labor. But, you see, that doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. And maybe Escher Wyss had to use slave labor to make their products for the Nazis because of a worker shortage.

This is a common tactic in corporate media: Take a false claim that circulates on the web (in this case, an image incorrectly identified as Eugen Schwab) and use that single post to discredit the entire factual connection between Schwab and the Nazis.

DID GUN CONTROL JUST ADMIT FIREARM MANUFACTURING IS A NET POSITIVE FOR COMMUNITIES?

A recent column in The Atlantic on the decline and despair of New Haven, Conn., caught my attention. It’s an area that many of those associated with the firearm industry are, at least, aware of. For me, it’s a little closer to home. It’s where my family’s roots run deep – both in the city and in the firearm industry.

When I read the author, Nicholas Dawidoff, lamented the decline of the city and pined for the days when Winchester Repeating Arms Company had a solid presence, it caught my eye. It was curious to me that a left-of-center publication made the tacit admission that a firearm manufacturer was a pillar that held the city up. When it was gone, the city fell into decay.

It was even more curious when The Trace, the mouthpiece of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety gun control group, echoed the author’s understated findings. Solid manufacturing jobs were good for New Haven. Dawidoff spoke glowingly of the immigrant and African American heritage that comprised the community and filled the factories. It was a working-class community. It had its struggles, but it was home and it was safe.

“Nobody locked their doors,” Dawidoff wrote.

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BOLD-FACED LIE: Gun Control Groups Twist Heritage Foundation Data Out of Recognition in Court Documents

A conglomerate of gun control groups has filed a brief in federal court supporting the District of Columbia in a lawsuit challenging the city’s prohibition on civilian possession of magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

This was not at all surprising.

What was quite perplexing, however, was the gun control groups’ citation of two of my recent monthly articles for The Daily Signal on defensive gun use. The groups claim the two articles “support” the premise that the District’s ban doesn’t negatively affect law-abiding gun owners, because none of the cases I cited “involved the use of anywhere close to 10 rounds of ammunition.”

Worse, the gun control groups spun this as The Heritage Foundation, among others, having “acknowledged that the ability to fire more than 10 rounds of ammunition without reloading is not necessary for defensive purposes.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

These are incredible claims in the most literal sense: They lack any credibility.

At best, the legal brief’s characterization of my monthly articles on defensive gun use is lazy to the point of recklessness and wrongly attributes to my employer, The Heritage Foundation, a policy position that it doesn’t hold. At worst, this constitutes an intentional effort to manipulate a federal court with a blatantly misleading representation of Heritage’s work on defensive gun use.

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Everything in the Narrative, nothing outside the Narrative, nothing against the Narrative. (with no apologies to the deadhead fascist)

Total media blackout of the scariest Second Amendment story of 2022

Stephen Gutowski at The Reload, one of the rare honest voices in firearms-related journalism, published some bombshell revelations two weeks ago. What was uncovered, in my opinion, is the biggest Second Amendment story of 2022. The extent and depth of what happened at the CDC is flat-out alarming.

Gun control activists know that Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) are a thorn on their side because they make selling gun control harder. Therefore, in what can be uncharitably described as a conspiracy against the civil rights of The People, they mounted a months-long pressure campaign, using influence from a Democrat Senator and the White House, to privately meet with CDC officials to get higher-end DGU statistics removed from the CDC website.

One CDC official called the gun control activists “partners” in an email.

Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in one email to the three advocates on December 10th. “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.”

While conspiring with gun control activists behind closed doors, the CDC at the same time did not bother reaching out to the researcher whose higher-end DGU estimates were yanked from the CDC website:

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

Not everything was recorded either:

The three advocates met with CDC Acting Principal Deputy Director Deb Houry, Associate Director of Science for the Division of Violence Prevention Tom Simon, and Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication Beth Reimels. The half-hour meeting was conducted over Microsoft Teams, but a transcript of the call either wasn’t kept or wasn’t turned over as part of the FOIA request. The CDC did not respond to questions about what was said during the meeting.

[…]

Some of the FOIAd emails also show officials setting up plans to talk about potential changes “off-line.” Additionally, 18 of the 131 pages released by the CDC were completely redacted.

There was a failed attempt at redacting a comment about the connection between activists from different organizations:

The CDC attempted to redact Mercy’s comment about the tie between GVA and the gun-control group, but it only applied the redaction to one of the several copies of the exchange included in the release.

The CDC did not bother talking to the researcher whose work they yanked at the behest of the gun control activists.

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

What the CDC did was indeed censorship, but there’s more censorship at play here. And that’s the mainstream media’s complete and total blackout of this story. I have been following the news just about daily to see who does and doesn’t cover this story. So far, to the best of my knowledge, the only coverage from a large media organization has come from Fox News, who reported on the collusion between the CDC and gun control activists, and then followed up with another story on some Republicans in Congress demanding that the CDC reinstate the statistics. Other than these stories, there’s minor coverage at The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and the New York Post which reports it as the “grumbling” of a researcher.

This is not the first time that the CDC has been up to no good, but that an agency that was founded to combat malaria has been repurposed to attack the very rights of the people who created it with their hard-earned money and vested it with its powers is infuriating to say the least.

The Fourth Estate is supposed to keep an eye on things like this. Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty, and when the mainstream media abdicates its duty, liberty is imperiled.

Well, it isn’t often referred to as ‘Peoples Public Radio’ (as in how commie China’s calls everything “peoples”) for nothing. And I don’t like my tax money funding either.

PBS openly pushes gun control agenda

American taxpayers help fund PBS. We don’t pay for all of it, but a non-trivial sum of tax dollars go to the network. Any attempt to cut that funding is met with consternation. “How dare you cut funding to [insert innocuous PBS show here]!”

They ignore that this is a network that continually pushes an agenda. Part of that agenda is gun control, and they’re not even really trying to hide it.

On Friday’s Amanpour & Co., fill-in host Sara Sidner devoted a segment to promoting the agenda of a gun control advocate and made no serious effort to challenge her liberal guest’s claims.

In the pre-recorded interview with Dr. Joseph Safran which aired on PBS and CNN International, Sidner promoted such misinformation as claiming that mass shootings are “uniquely American,” and she also overstated the number of mass killings in 2022.

Sidner misleadingly began the segment:

2022 will go down as the second highest year for mass shootings in the United States on record. That means more than 600 mass killings in the past 12 months alone, according to data compiled by the nongovernmental organization, Gun Violence Archive. The shootings come at a disturbing pace, often too fast to grasp — people going about their day suddenly gunned down in schools, supermarkets, night clubs, movie theaters, in the streets, you name it.

She soon added: “Are these tragedies preventable? And why can’t we stop this uniquely American problem?”

But, according to the website she cited, there have been 36 cases of gun-related “mass murder” in 2022, which would also include killings in private residences in addition to public places. Additionally, there are certainly plenty of other countries where homicide numbers are high.

On the subject of mass shootings in public places, Europe has had a worse problem than the U.S., which, unlike the U.S., has even included fully automatic machine gun attacks.

In other words, this isn’t a “uniquely American problem” and it never has been. We just think that because we tend to be far more focused on what’s happening here than elsewhere in the world. I mean, sure, we know that Ukraine and Russia are at war, but do we know who the major opposition members are in Belgium?

Not so much.

So, we focus on American mass shootings because they’re closer to home, then delude ourselves into thinking that these kinds of things just don’t happen anywhere else.

We’ve seen numerous mass shootings outside of American borders. Thailand, for example, or Russia. Those are just two right off the top of my head, and I don’t see all such shootings by any stretch of the imagination.

The idea that this is a “uniquely American problem” needs to be challenged, but PBS didn’t. They advanced it. They present it uncritically as if this is so self-evident that it doesn’t require challenge.

Yet it does. It’s not a factual statement, and the fact that it’s treated as such is a big chunk of why we can’t solve the issue.

If people acknowledged that these shootings were far from unusual in places like Europe, they’d be forced to face the facts that gun control isn’t an answer. They’d have to look elsewhere for a solution, and that could be difficult and potentially messy.

So, they blame guns, pretend it isn’t happening in other places, and get PBS to help push that agenda.

Well, this is why some of us want to cut off taxpayer funding for them. You want to keep them afloat? Then you pay for it. I’m sick of it.

Putting Clothes on the Emperor.

I have been watching the release of the Twitter files. As someone who was shadowbanned, I am watching with interest. I was early to Twitter and my original account got to 10k followers, then never went higher. I got so ticked I finally killed my account. I tried other social media platforms, but they were echo chambers.

Parler was coming on strong to challenge Twitter, and Big Tech used its power to kill it.

I am back on Twitter @pointsnfigures1 and I am paying Elon’s $8 fee for a blue check. I am happy to pay it since you know advertisers will try to leave the platform. It’s a small show of support for what he is doing for the platform. Feel free to follow me if you want.

When you are in a bubble, or you need to perpetuate a bubble, you consciously ignore data that would pop your bubble. For example, people still think Trump colluded with Russia to steal an election despite reams of data showing the contrary. People still think that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a nothing burger and the mainstream news media still hasn’t reported on it. It’s amazing.

Today, Elon tweeted that and the left-wing reacted with predictable outrage.

My guess is this is a hint as to what is coming. It’s already clear that the US government worked closely with Twitter employees to turn Twitter into a mouthpiece for leftist causes and the Democratic Party. The “Twitter Files” are the receipts.

Is Elon doing this stuff to drive engagement to the platform? You bet. I would too if I were Elon.

As an aside, Musk is kind of an amazing guy, isn’t he? He has SpaceX, Tesla($TSLA), The Boring Company, and Twitter. He must be able to recruit some pretty top-notch people to work for him at those companies because it would be impossible to be CEO and “hands-on” at all of them at the same time. It might be fun to work in a corporate culture that is guided by Musk.

My bet is that Twitter will get bigger, and somehow enter the payments industry. Combining cutting-edge information with payments will be fun to watch.

Should people go to jail, especially former Twitter employees? I am not an attorney but law professor Jonathon Turley thinks the former employees of Twitter ought to be lawyering up. My guess is they have about as much chance to go to jail as Sam Bankman Fried. I’d love to see people like John Brennan charged since they intentionally mislead the American public as well. But, that would be a hard case to prove.

What is sort of amazing to me is the willingness of the sheep on the left to continue to blindly follow the narrative despite clear and transparent releases that show exactly what everyone has been up to.

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Twitter Files Expose Dangerous Deep State-Big Tech Revolving Door

It’s not just the Forrest Gump of Russiagate — ex-FBI General Counsel James Baker — who is core to the conspiracy to crush the First Amendment

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This weekend I was pleased to appear in print in the New York Post to discuss the cozy and corrupting ties between the U.S. government — particularly the security state — and Big Tech revealed in the Twitter Files.

I connect the dots in the Post — dots that I believe collectively depict a key piece of the overall War on Wrongthink picture: A Ruling Class conspiracy to crush the First Amendment in pursuit of total ideological and therefore cultural and political power.

Read the whole thing here.

The Twitter Files were also one subject of our latest “NatCon Squad,” which you can check out below or wherever you get your podcasts.

NY Times Says Most Gun Owners are Law-Abiding, AR-15s are in Common Use, and Confiscation is Futile…Then Calls for 1st Amendment Limits on Gun Makers

It is important, of course, to distinguish between the large majority of law-abiding gun owners and the small number of extremists. Only about 30 percent of gun owners have owned an AR-15 or similar rifle, a majority support common sense gun restrictions and a majority reject political violence. …

Democrats, while they may hope for stricter gun laws overall, should also recognize that they do share common ground with many gun owners — armed right-wing extremists and those who fetishize AR-15s do not represent typical American gun owners or their beliefs. That’s especially true given the changing nature of who owns guns in the United States: women and Black Americans are among the fastest-growing demographics.

This summer, for the first time in decades, Congress passed major bipartisan gun safety legislation — a major accomplishment and a sign that common ground is not terra incognita. It should have gone further — and can in the future: preventing anyone under 21 from buying a semiautomatic weapon, for instance, and erasing the 10-year sunset of the background-check provision. States should also be compelled to pass tougher red-flag laws to take guns out of the hands of suicidal or potentially violent people. Mandatory gun-liability insurance is also an idea with merit.

States and the federal government should also pass far tougher regulations on the gun industry, particularly through restrictions on the marketing of guns, which have helped supercharge the cult of the AR-15. New York’s law, which allows parties like victims of gun violence and the state government to sue gun sellers, manufacturers and distributors, is a good model for other states to follow.

Federal regulators should also do more to regulate the arms industry’s marketing practices, which are becoming more deadly and deranged by the year. They have the legal authority to do so but, thus far, not the will to act.

Americans are going to live with a lot of guns for a long time. There are already more than 415 million guns in circulation, including 25 million semiautomatic military-style rifles. Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic. With proper care and maintenance, guns made today will still fire decades from now. Each month, Americans add nearly two million more to the national stockpile.

But even if common-sense regulation of guns is far from political reality, Americans do not have to accept the worst of gun culture becoming pervasive in our politics. The only hope the nation has for living in and around so many deadly weapons is a political system capable of resolving our many differences without the need to use them.

— New York Times Editorial Board in America’s Toxic Gun Culture